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Esi Hardy is a business owner, running a business called Celebrating Disability. She has cerebral palsy, a neurological condition affecting all four limbs, with limited dexterity in her hands.
During her career, Esi’s role was to advocate for and empower disabled people to find employment. She saw the barriers faced by disabled people trying to access employment in many companies and left the role in 2017 after having had enough. With the support of a Job Centre careers advisor, within 2 weeks Esi had started her own disability inclusion in the workplace business, Celebrating Disability. She joined a free mentoring programme for people wanting to set up a business, benefiting from being the only person on the course and having her mentor’s full attention to get the business off the ground.
Esi’s goal was to work with businesses to develop inclusive cultures where disabled people can thrive, feel confident and safe. She now supports her clients to understand the barriers they erect, preventing disabled people from feeling included, and the resulting daily biases that disabled people face.
Celebrating Disability, run by and advocating for disabled people, creates services and solutions for their clients that will help them to mitigate and eradicate the barriers so that disabled people can be successful, empowered, and feel part of the workplace. Their services include guest speaking and inclusion audits which provide a gap analysis to identify what businesses can be doing to be more inclusive.
“People do not understand the level of inaccessibility that disabled people face on a daily basis. It’s not just about stairs being a barrier to a wheelchair user, it’s turning your back on a deaf person when they are trying to communicate with you, or more subtly, not realising that some people take longer to process information due to an invisible impairment, for example.”
Esi and 3 other trainers make up a team with a diverse range of impairments whose expertise enable Celebrating Disability to create tailored solutions from a diverse impairment perspective, to meet the desired outcomes of their client.
I didn’t have a clue what I was doing.
“I literally set up a business overnight! I didn’t have a sales background at all and no idea how to ask people what they wanted.”
“The mentoring programme I had joined was really supportive in getting me started, but I still had so much to learn about running a business.”
I had gaps in my knowledge.
I didn’t really know what it was I was selling.
“I had no idea how to articulate the service I was selling. I had no idea what it took to sell a product. I didn’t know how to talk about it.“
“I went to loads of networking events in the beginning, but small talk and pitching in such a short space of time was a challenge for me and I was too proud to admit it wasn’t working. This caused me to waste loads of time and it took me years to ask for help.”
“Other business owners I knew looked like they had everything sorted too. I didn’t realise that everyone had their struggles. As I was approaching the £100K turnover level, I was really starting to struggle to do everything myself without any resources.”
“I came across BBB 5 years before I actually joined. At that time, I attended their Foundation Programme, but it wasn’t the right time for me. My defences were up so high and this was preventing me from learning. I thought I had it all sorted.”
“I was invited to a conference held at Soho Farmhouse which gave me the opportunity to speak to much bigger corporate businesses. They sat up and paid attention to what I was saying, and I realised the networking I had done previously was targeting the wrong audience. Feeling listened to gave me so much confidence about the clients I needed to be targeting, and I landed two big clients after that. Things began to click into place and I was able to start growing the business.”
“I later came across BBB on LinkedIn and attended a workshop because I knew I needed help. What I loved about it was that Tracey made me feel so special and I joined BBB because of their expertise.”
Esi joined Success Groups Build and graduated to the next level after 16 months.
IT’S REALLY FUN!
“I show up to BBB because it’s really fun! You have to have enjoyment in business and I’m very emotionally connected to what I do. My personality matches the way George, Tracey and their team deliver their membership, and I love it. I can just be me. I don’t have to hold anything back and they are there for me.”
“Listening to other people’s challenges, being able to offer an idea, and others giving me their expertise and ideas really helps me feel confident that I'm not on my own. Realising that I don’t have to have all the ideas, and that I can lean on the group for help, is great. Taking their ideas and seeing how I can apply that to my business is really helpful.”
“The way George gets us to think about the content he is delivering – what this means to us and how we can apply it to our businesses – is really effective.
I take ideas and suggestions back to my team every month and look at how we can implement them.”
“I get so much from the content sessions. They are really interactive, and lots of my learning comes from the monthly sessions.”
“When you develop that confidence it’s a lot easier to develop in everything else and I’m now a competent business owner, which is a direct result of working with Tracey and George.”
“I’ve developed my value and mission, and I understand how I can offer that value to my clients. We deliver the right service, to the right client, for the right reason, and I benchmark everything against this now. It’s important to me that we take our clients on a journey of progression, and that we can demonstrate that to our future clients.”
“Developing my niche has been really helpful. I wasn’t clear on this before I joined BBB. I’m now clear on what we do, and what we don’t do. I have much more confidence saying no when the client’s not right for us, rather than just grasping at everything that comes in.”
“BBB has helped me define what my services are, how to talk about them, and what value I’m offering to my clients.”
“I’ve always been a spontaneous decision-maker. What BBB has done is help me understand that I can be spontaneous, but that I can still think it through at the same time.”
“As we broke the £100K mark we were ready to move up into Build Plus. What’s great about Build Plus is that everyone in the group is at the same stage as me now, and our barriers and challenges are very similar. Each question being asked, and the thoughts and advice given, relates to where I am now.”
“I think some of the biggest outcomes of joining BBB are the intangible ones. BBB lead by example, and I have unconsciously taken that into my business. The way I now aim to deliver my services, to help my clients, is the result of learning and seeing how BBB do it.”
“This coming year, I want more of the same. Above all, I want to come to work and enjoy it, be productive and get shit done. I’m very competitive, and I’m striving to win a business award!”
“If you're considering joining BBB, consider what you want from your business. You have got to be willing to put in the work and learn, you are not going to be told what to do. This is about developing yourself as a business owner, to be empowered to develop and build the business you want to build, and this is where BBB can help you.”
“BBB are really supportive of everything going on with you, personal or business related, and that’s really important to say. It’s a holistic approach that supports your wellbeing as much as your business development. The two are intrinsic, and BBB understands that. I can just show up as I am, and I don’t have to pretend to be professional when that’s not where I am in that moment. I don’t have to pretend I have it all together. At some stage everybody shows up to their session having a shit week and the Members and BBB Team are so supportive.
